Class Meeting 4

We played a number of singing games:

• Sarasponda
• Three in the Middle
• Rig a Jig Jig
• Big Bootie (We discussed using a variety of work up games for skip counting and other applications. We also played a related drama game with all participants. Each one is an animal (or any other category) with an action. Say your animal and show the action two times--"bear bear" and then say someone else's two times "chicken chicken". Then, whoever is chicken says their animal twice followed by someone else's. All participants must maintain the steady beat throughout. If you mess up, you go to the end. Try to un-seat the person in the number one seat.)
• Chocolate (This is like Double Double. We used this game to explore four syllable words and made up new ways to play the game.)

Then we did two movement activities:

• Mirror Movement
• Flocking (This video shows the basic concept. We did it in groups of four in diamond shapes. The person at the front does the movement for the rest to copy. If that person turns 90 degrees to the right, that places a new person at the front who, of course, becomes the new leader. In the video they do this with a bunch of people and turn 180 degrees. We played slow music in the background for this activity and the previous one.)

Next, we played ocarinas. The packet of songs can be found here.

After that, we discussed forward planning. Basically, the idea is that when you have an engaging and complex activity like the flocking activity we did earlier, you can take that to your curriculum guide and see if there is some place it could fit (as opposed to backwards planning where you start with the curriculum standard and work backwards and find an authentic activity to use in order to teach the concept or skill. I recommend reciprocal planning where you work forwards AND backwards). We explored the ELA core to see if there were reading and writing standards that could be addressed somehow through the use of flocking--by adding something to or extending the flocking movement activity to include text.

Finally, we tried the Habitats lesson for music, art, ELA, and science integration.